“No. It will be best to say good-bye now.” She looked over her shoulder. “I have enjoyed knowing you, Lord Vitor Courtenay. I have never had a friend quite like you. A friend with advantages.” The partial smile peeked forth again briefly. “But now our ways will part.”
He did not believe her. He could not.
Only a man possessed by an ungovernable passion would pursue a dangerous course without first considering all potential pitfalls.
She blinked swiftly, then turned and moved away. But again she paused.
“How do they say farewell in this country? Is it au revoir or adieu?”
“à bient?t,” he said. “They say à bient?t.”
She nodded, and he stood amidst the gravestones and watched her disappear.
So long. He would not say good-bye or farewell to her, no matter what the French said. So long. Because even a moment without her now seemed forever.
Chapter 21
The Gift
They buried Petti at sea. In his adventurous youth he had briefly served as an officer in his His Majesty’s Royal Navy and had always wished to be put to rest in the briny deep wearing naval blue and white. Never mind that he’d only been a sub-lieutenant or some such thing. Ravenna was certain he’d been as charming standing on the deck of a ship as he had always been on land. Sir Beverley did not again shed tears, but as the sailors tilted the plank and the sea swallowed his life’s companion, she took his hand and found it trembling.
Before continuing on to Shelton Grange they stopped in London, where Sir Beverley placed a death notice in the Times and met with Petti’s solicitor.
“Sixty-eight calling cards,” she exclaimed, dropping the pile onto the tiny gilded table in the foyer of Sir Beverley’s house. “The notice only ran in the paper this morning and we were only gone three hours. I always knew he was popular, but I never quite understood how very popular.” Removing the leashes from around the pugs’ chubby necks and sending them up the stairs to their favorite parlor, she paused on the middle riser. “By the by, Beverley,” she said over her shoulder, “what will you do with his house?”
“Why, my dear?” He stood at the table, an elegant portrait in black, filing through the stack of correspondence. “Do you wish to abandon me and live there in solitary splendor?” He jested, she knew, but there was a note of anguish beneath his urbane drawl.
“Of course not. I only wonder what will happen to it. I adore that old rose trellis and the gardens and fishpond. They are so spectacularly unkempt.”
“Francis preferred to spend his money on wine rather than gardeners, of course.” He discarded several pieces of the post, then came to the bottom of the stairs. “As to the house, impertinent girl, he left it and all his other worldly goods to you.”
Ravenna was obliged, then, to sit for many minutes on the step in order to find her breath. Sir Beverley brought her a beverage in a crystal glass that made her cough and sputter. When a knock on the door echoed through the foyer, he said, “More callers, I suspect.” She leaped to her feet and hurried up to the parlor.
The pugs were not in the parlor. Instead, a tall man with black hair nearly to his shoulders and a crooked smile across his darkly handsome face sat in the window box. Arms crossed and eyes on the door, clearly he awaited her entrance.
“Tali!” She flew to him.
Taliesin accepted her embrace with manly tolerance, then extracted himself.
“Hello, mite.”
“What are you doing here?” She went to close the door, and when Sir Beverley’s excessively correct London footman gave her a disapproving frown, she bit her tongue between her teeth.
“I see you’ve grown into a real lady,” Taliesin said with a chuckle. Often his laughter had been a balm when the church ladies had scolded and she escaped to the Gypsy caravan to forget about it. Now that laughter came from a deep, broad chest. “Which of your sisters taught you that showing your tongue to a grown man was a wise idea? Arabella, I suspect.”
“Neither. I learned it on my own. I am very clever like that.”
“I hear you’re very clever in general.”
“Do you? How? Have you been to visit Papa?”
“No.”
Not in years, Ravenna suspected. At one time Taliesin had been nearly a son to the Reverend. But now when he traveled to Cornwall for the summer fair, he did not visit the vicarage where Eleanor still lived with Papa.
“A man named Henry Feathers was speaking to me of you only yesterday,” he said.
“Sir Henry! Is he here in London?”
“He has a breeding mare I might purchase. We were doing business and he mentioned that he’d recently met a girl, a young slip of a thing, he said, who knew everything any horse doctor he’d ever met knew about healing an animal’s hoof.”
“I do,” she said. “You taught me most of it, of course.”
“He also said you saved a man’s life. A titled lord.”
“I did that too.” With help. Her stomach tightened, and the door inside her chest that she was obliged to close every hour because its lock was broken burst open anew and filled her with aching.
“A titled lord?” Taliesin said again.
She shook her head. “Don’t look at me that way.”
“I am not looking at you in any particular way.” Then he repeated. “A titled lord?” He folded his arms across his chest again. “Arabella, certainly. But you pursuing a titled lord, mite? I sense a hidden motive.”
“I was not trying to encourage him to hire me. He was actually ill.”
“His property must be hundreds of acres larger than Clark’s,” he said with a spark in his eyes that were as black as hers. “Acres and acres of land.” He knew her nearly as well as her sisters did. He had fetched her home from the far edges of the parish as often as Arabella or Eleanor had. He knew of her escapes. She suspected that he, raised among wandering souls, understood how no land was ever big enough.
“I have been offered an enviable post in Philadelphia,” she said. “I still haven’t decided whether I will accept it.”
His response was as unlike Vitor Courtenay’s as possible. Vitor’s perfect, handsome face had shown perfect shock. Now Taliesin’s single raised brow spoke everything.
“What are you running from this time?”
“Arabella still—” she began, but had to draw an extra breath to continue. “Arabella still has that foolish notion the fortune-teller put in her head that one of us must marry a prince.”
“I thought she married a duke. Lycombe, isn’t it?”
“She did. Now she wants me to marry the prince, but I don’t wish to.”
“And you think you need to sail all the way to America to avoid this fate?” He laughed. “Ravenna Caulfield, you may be gifted with animals, but in all other ways you are as shake-brained as a—”
“My brains do not shake, and I think if I found someone else who would marry me, Bella would stop pestering me about a prince.” Beneath her ribs, her heart was so tangled she could barely think. “Would you?”
Both brows rose now. Then his eyes changed. Slowly he shook his head and smiled at her with some pity but mostly sympathy. “You know I cannot, mite.”
“I know it, of course.” Then to pique him she said, “And I suppose all that being married business would be awkward.”